The UFO Casebook received the following report on 01-30-06 of a sighting with photographs on 01-28-06:

I'm going to send you two clear examples of objects which are flying near airplanes. I can only see one object in the second photo; but it flying very fast. In the first photograph, I didn't see the object but it appeared when the picture was uploaded to my computer. It was a cloudy day when the photos were taken. The photos were taken with a Kodak Easy Share DX4530 digital camera in auto mode, near the airport of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.Thanks, ofnava

Clas Svahn UFO-Sweden reports, " The experienced Swedish Air Force pilot flew a J-35F "Draken" fighter plane on a routine training mission between the islands of Öland and Gotland in the Baltic Sea southeast of Sweden when he was diverted to chase a target by the ground control radar about noon in the summer of 1977. The ground control had picked up a target further East of Sweden, and the pilot was at the time of the call around 100 kilometers from the target.

Identifying unknown targets were routine during these days, Swedish military went up several times every week identifying Russian and American spy planes flying in a strip outside Gotland. This time the target behaved different. The radar control on ground, situated 100 kilometers from the object, reported it to be stationary, something that was later confirmed by the pilot as he approached the object. In a taped telephone interview made on June 19, 1999, the pilot told me that he approached the target at a speed of Mach 0,9 and soon got the object on his own radar screen. He was flying at 1.000 meters altitude straight towards the UFO. and had the object 500 meters above his altitude.

"When I was 10 kilometers from the object it suddenly started to move straight up", he told me. "I never saw it with my naked eye, but could follow it on my radar and decided to light up (the after burner) and started to follow the target. I had a perfect lock on it all the time. His "Draken", which was the latest model J-35F, climbed at an angle of 70 degrees trying to keep up with the target. According to the pilot he never came closer than 6-8 kilometers. "When I was at 10.000 meters the object flew out of the radar range, straight out in space. It was at an altitude of 40 to 50 kilometers at that time.

I aborted the chase but stayed in the area for 2-3 minutes trying to locate the object but was unable to find anything." "My aircraft was leaving vapor trails behind me, but the object left none", he says. "I really looked for them but there were none." The weather was fine with 3/8 cumulus. His comments were, "I do not know of any single aircraft that would have been able to - from zero - out fly a "Draken" at that time." He never reported the incident after landing at the airbase F-12 in Kalmar at the time but reported to ground control that the object was gone as he came to the scene. "The ground control radar did not look at vertical movements after they had led me to the target, so when the object started moving upwards it just seamed to have vanished of the screen for them", the pilot said. The incident came to UFO-Sweden's attention when he sent an e-mail to us a couple of years ago. On June 19, 1999, I made a telephone interview with him. Sadly he died in a helicopter accident a year after. Thanks to Clas Svahn UFO-Sweden

Feb. 11, 2006 — American archaeologists have found King Tut's neighbors in the Valley of the Kings, making the first discovery of a new tomb in the desert valley since King Tutankhamun's was uncovered in 1922, according to Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Called KV 63 — it is the 63rd discovered since the valley was first mapped in the 18th century — the new, intact tomb was found just 16 feet away from the boy pharaoh's resting place by a team of archaeologists from the University of Memphis, led by Otto Schaden.

Schaden discovered the tomb, buried under 13 feet of rubble and stones, by accident, while conducting "routine digs" on the nearby tomb of King Amenmesses, a 19th Dynasty pharaoh.

"The tomb appears to date to the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1539-1292 B.C.) and it contains five human mummies and several pottery vessels," the University of Memphis said in a statement.

So far, archaeologists have not entered the burial site, as workers are still clearing rubble. However, Egyptian authorities had a first look Friday into the rectangular single chamber through an opening of its four-foot-high door.

Five wooden sarcophagi in human shapes with colored funerary masks laid surrounded by more than 20 jars, sealed with pharaonic seals, Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.

The jars were placed haphazardly, as if the burial was completed in a hurry.

"For an unknown reason they were buried rapidly in the small tomb," Hawass said.

Though the Valley of the Kings, on the West bank of the Nile outside Luxor, was the burial ground for many pharaohs, the University of Memphis archaeologists do not think the K63 mummies are royal.

Most likely, they were members of a pharaoh's court from the 18th Dynasty, when Egypt's power was at its height.

The first of the New Kingdom, the 18th Dynasty's capital was in Thebes, the present day city of Luxor. It included pharaohs such as Amenhotep I, the warrior pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, Egypt's only female pharaoh, Akhenaten, the "heretic" pharaoh and Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh.

According to Patricia Podzorski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis, the KV 63 discovery has finally broken the century-long belief that there wasn't anything left to discover in the Valley of the Kings.

"Many archaeologists said the valley was done 100 years ago¦ obviously, they were wrong," Podzorski said.

THE modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks.

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

“Human hair and eye color are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits.”

Frost’s theory, to be published this week in Evolution and Human Behavior, the academic journal, was supported by Professor John Manning, a specialist in evolutionary psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. “Hair and eye color tend to be uniform in many parts of the world, but in Europe there is a welter of variants,” he said. “The mate choice explanation now being put forward is, in my mind, close to being correct.”

Frost’s theory is also backed up by a separate scientific analysis of north European genes carried out at three Japanese universities, which has isolated the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair to about 11,000 years ago.

The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.

Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to the new research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.

Instead, Frost attributes the rapid evolution to how they gathered food. In Africa there was less dependence on animals and women were able to collect fruit for themselves. In Europe, by contrast, food gathering was almost exclusively a male hunter’s preserve. The retreating ice sheets left behind a landscape of fertile soil with plenty of grass and moss for herbivorous animals to eat, but few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips, where the death rate was high.

The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high estrogen levels in women.

Jilly Cooper, 69, the author, described how in her blonde youth she had “certainly got more glances. I remember when I went to Majorca when I was 20, my bum was sore from getting pinched.”

However, Jodie Kidd, 27, the blonde model, disagrees with the theory: “I don’t think being blonde makes you more ripe for sexual activity. It’s much more to do with personality than what you look like. Beauty is much deeper than the color of your hair.”

Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organization found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

Feb. 3, 2006 — Photographs taken by an undersea robot are providing the first public glimpse of a wrecked ancient Greek merchant ship loaded with olive oil and wine that probably capsized in a sudden gust of wind off the coast of the island of Chios in the fourth century B.C.

The images represent a breakthrough in underwater technology since the exploration of the Titanic; the robot photographer in this case was fully autonomous, according to a recent MIT press release. Scientists program the robot, called "SeaBED," with missions that can be changed via an acoustic modem once the robot is launched.

The project, which brought together research teams from MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Hellenic Center for Marine Research, is also providing clues about ancient vessels and early trade routes.

Brendan Foley, one of the project's leaders and a researcher in WHOI's Deep Submergence Laboratory, told Discovery News that the single-masted ship was about 55 feet long and 16 feet wide. He believes some of its wooden hull is still intact beneath sea floor sediments.

Strewn across the eastern Aegean Sea floor below 200 feet of water lies what's left of the ship's cargo. Since the remains are tightly contained within the dimensions of the wreckage site, the researchers theorize wind might have violently heeled the ship, shifted the cargo and then made the ship unstable before it capsized.

Foley and his colleagues think the vessel once carried around 1,000 ceramic jars called amphorae, several of which have survived.

"The amphorae from Chios are slightly less than 39 inches tall, and contained approximately five gallons," Foley said. He explained that chemical analysis, along with other evidence, suggests many contained wine. He added, "As far as olive oil, sometimes olive pits are found in amphoras. Occasionally amphoras show sign of re-use, with resin-lined amphoras containing olive pits. So, we surmise based on previous archaeological evidence and texts that the amphoras on the Chios Classical wreck carried wine and also possibly olive oil."

Since the containers came from Chios, the researchers suspect that if the shipment was intended for a single market, the vessel likely was headed for Corinth or Athens before it capsized.

"However," Foley said, "in 356-354 B.C., just before we think this ship sank, Athens fought a war against Chios and other former allies in the eastern Aegean, called the 'Social War.' Questions we have are, 'What was the nature of Chios' economy after the Social War? Did Chios and Athens resume their trade upon the conclusion of that war? Did Chios find new markets instead?"

Another unsolved mystery is the fate of the men who manned the vessel. The scientists think there were three or four, and they might have survived. "The ship wrecked less than a mile from shore, so it is possible that the crew and any passengers might have made their way to shore by swimming or by clinging to bits of floating wreckage," Foley said.

Jonathan Adams, a specialist in maritime archaeology at the University of Southampton in England, told Discovery News that while this vessel is not the oldest shipwreck, a distinction that goes to a 3,300-year-old boat that sunk off the coast of Turkey, it "is interesting due to its well-organized cargo, which suggests the Greeks were already quite industrialized."

Adams also said the research is noteworthy because it could enhance our understanding of trade in the classical world, and because the exploration utilized such high-tech equipment. This June, Foley and his colleagues plan to return to the Aegean to study an underwater volcano and two other ancient shipwrecks.

Now that the new discovery of the keel sections of Titanic have been publicly released, it is time for the Titanic enthusiasts to mull over the information. Although a discovery of this magnitude answers several questions, it poses even more questions about its interpretation. The naval architect, Roger Long gave a very plausible explanation of how two relatively intact keel sections could be found in a newly discovered debris field east of the main bow and stern sections of the wreck site. I find that I have so many questions to address regarding his potential scenario of the sinking. At times I found myself talking to the television and saying "No way!"

Obviously I was not the only one that was saying something similar. Parks Stephenson, one of the show's technical experts that was portrayed at Woods Hole and member of the marine forensics panel of the Society of Naval Engineers, has a different take on the data retrieved from the discovery. His views can be found on his web site at Marconigraph.com and his analysis of the sinking seems more logical to me. That is not to say it is right or wrong, but I am more comfortable with his thoughts at the present time.

I am very grateful to David Concannon and Robert Williams for setting this whole investigative theory into an active hunt for the new evidence. In 2003, both Robert Williams and Fred McLaren spent their entire dives doing "sand sweeps" outside the perimeter of the main sections of Titanic in pursuit of keel pieces. Even though they had limited success, their time spent on the bottom ruled out sections that needed to be explored. I am sure that the limited amount of dives available to the latest research team can owe these researchers a debt of thanks for narrowing their search pattern.

As the new evidence is being "digested" by the many interested Titanic enthusiasts, including me, there will be many new and ingenious interpretations of the new discovery. For further analysis of the bow and stern sections of the ship, please visit our corporate web site and in the text of the homepage, select Educational Services for photographs of the wreck site from this year's scientific research Titanic exploration. I certainly need more information to satisfy my own curiosity. This new evidence does not rule out the grounding theory but certainly assists in a more accurate portrayal of speculation about Titanic's sinking. I think that Roger and Parks explanations, both very different, are a wonderful foundation for further research and study. I commend all of these individuals for putting together a thoroughly enjoyable evening that will be talked about for years to come!

ZHENGZHOU, Feb. 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Archaeologists in the central China province of Henan have excavated 336 tombs dating back more than 3,000 years.

Arranged in a U shape, the tombs were unearthed near Hebi City at the Liuzhuang ruins of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.). Funeral objects were discovered in 208 of the 336 tombs, including tomahawks, strings of turquoise stone beads, ancient cooking vessels and basins.

The most noticeable among these tombs contained a stone coffin, which was formed by 13 stones. Archaeologists also discovered that in some of the tombs, stones were put beside the head or feet of the tomb owner.

Judging from the few funeral objects in each tomb and the shape and structure of the tombs, archaeologists said that the tombs belonged to a clan of middle to lower class of their day.

This is the first time that such a great number of Shang tombs have been unearthed in Henan Province and the discovery provides valuable evidence for studying the funeral rituals, social structure, and culture of the Shang Dynasty, said Zhao Xinping, a research fellow with the Henan Provincial Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Research Institute.

The discovery of the stone coffin, which had not previously been seen in central China at that time, provides clues to the origin of the Shang people, Zhao said.

Located to the south of Liuzhuang Village of Qibin District in Hebi City, the Liuzhuang ruins covers more than 300,000 sq m. So far an area of 7,700 sq m. has been excavated.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Scientists surveying an isolated Indonesian jungle discovered dozens of new species of frogs, butterflies and plants, and glimpsed large mammals that have been hunted to near- extinction elsewhere, the team announced Tuesday.

The expedition also found rare animals that were remarkably unafraid of humans during the rapid survey of the Foja Mountains, an area with more than a million hectares of old growth tropical forest in Indonesia's easternmost Papua province, said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the month-long trip.

Two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal, simply allowed scientists to pick them up and bring them back to their camp to be studied, he said, noting that the enigmatic animals were probably so unwary because they never had seen people before.

The December 2005 expedition - organized by the U.S.-based environmental organization Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences - was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Swift Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Global Environment Project Institute.

Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has left an estimated 100,000 people dead, is one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.

The 11-member team of U.S., Indonesian and Australian scientists needed six permits before they could legally fly by helicopter to an open, boggy lakebed surrounded by forests near the range's western summit, where they set up camp at an altitude of 1,500 meters (yards).

"There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there," said Beehler, adding that two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the Foja Mountains, accompanied the expedition.

"They were as astounded as we were at how isolated it was," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington D.C. "As far as they knew, neither of their clans had ever been to the area."

The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species - including a tiny microhylid frog less than 14 millimeters (a half inch) long - four new butterfly species, and at least five new types of palms during their trip.

Their findings, however, will have to be published and then reviewed by peers before being officially classified as new species, a process that could take six months to several years.

One of the most remarkable discoveries was the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller new for Indonesia and previously thought to have been hunted to near extinction, and a new honeyeater bird, which has a bright orange face-patch with a pendant wattle under each eye, Beehler said.

Because of the rich diversity in the forest, the group rarely had to stray more than a few kilometers (miles) from their base camp. "We've only scratched the surface," said Beehler, vice president of Conservation International's Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, who hopes to return later this year with other scientists to continue the field work.

One of the reasons for the rainforest's isolation, he said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills was so abundant that they had no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.

There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.

"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system - not a single road," Beehler said. "But clearly with time everything is a threat. In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan. They will be very hungry for logs."

JOHOR BAHARU -- The Johor Wildlife Protection Society said it has "scientific evidence" to prove the existence of Bigfoot whose reported sightings recently in the Johor jungles have excited the world's media.

Not just one Bigfoot but a whole colony of the giant, hairy creatures which the society named "Orang Lenggor" (Lenggor People) as one was spotted in an area by that name, said the society's secretary Tay Teng Hwa.

"We will make public the evidence soon," he said today. He said a member of the society had studied the creatures for six years and interacted directly with the colony.

"The adult creatures are between 10 and 12 feet tall while their children are 6 to 7 footers. Seventy per cent of the Orang Lenggor have a human appearance but the rest resemble apes," he said.

Tay declined to reveal the location of the Bigfoot colony or the type of "scientific evidence" in the possession of the society. The claim by the society followed a statement by Johor Menteri Besar Datuk Abdul Ghani Othman that he was convinced about the existence of Bigfoot based on information provided by Orang Asli.

Tay said the society decided to reveal its discovery because foreigners armed with sophisticated equipment were entering the Johor jungles to track down Bigfoot without the knowledge of the state government. "We are worried these foreigners might find Bigfoot and then announce to the world as their discovery," he said.

Relating the background to the society's study of the creatures, he said a member of the society, who was a logger, came across Bigfoot when the creature encroached into the logging company's base camp to look for food. Since that incident, the member began to study the creatures and went close to their colony.

Tay said the creatures, despite their size and rough appearance, were timid and showed no aggression to humans who approached them.

The "Orang Lenggor" had a covering of black hair on their bodies when they were young but the hair gradually turned brown as they grew older, he said. "They like to eat fish and fruits they gather in the jungles, including durian. They also have a liking for river water that contains dissolved salt and would walk for miles to get it," he added. Tay said the society would organize an expedition to the "Orang Lenggor" colony in either March or April.

The loss of ice from Greenland doubled between 1996 and 2005, as its glaciers flowed faster into the ocean in response to a generally warmer climate, according to a NASA/University of Kansas study.

The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Science. It concludes the changes to Greenland's glaciers in the past decade are widespread, large and sustained over time. They are progressively affecting the entire ice sheet and increasing its contribution to global sea level rise.

Researchers Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam of the University of Kansas Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, Lawrence, used data from Canadian and European satellites. They conducted a nearly comprehensive survey of Greenland glacial ice discharge rates at different times during the past 10 years.

"The Greenland ice sheet's contribution to sea level is an issue of considerable societal and scientific importance," Rignot said. "These findings call into question predictions of the future of Greenland in a warmer climate from computer models that do not include variations in glacier flow as a component of change. Actual changes will likely be much larger than predicted by these models."

The evolution of Greenland's ice sheet is being driven by several factors. These include accumulation of snow in its interior, which adds mass and lowers sea level; melting of ice along its edges, which decreases mass and raises sea level; and the flow of ice into the sea from outlet glaciers along its edges, which also decreases mass and raises sea level. This study focuses on the least well known component of change, which is glacial ice flow. Its results are combined with estimates of changes in snow accumulation and ice melt from an independent study to determine the total change in mass of the Greenland ice sheet.

Rignot said this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the role of enhanced glacier flow, whereas prior studies of this nature had significant coverage gaps. Estimates of mass loss from areas without coverage relied upon models that assumed no change in ice flow rates over time. The researchers theorized if glacier acceleration is an important factor in the evolution of the Greenland ice sheet, its contribution to sea level rise was being underestimated.

To test this theory, the scientists measured ice velocity with interferometric synthetic-aperture radar data collected by the European Space Agency's Earth Remote Sensing Satellites 1 and 2 in 1996; the Canadian Space Agency's Radarsat-1 in 2000 and 2005; and the European Space Agency's Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar in 2005. They combined the ice velocity data with ice sheet thickness data from airborne measurements made between 1997 and 2005, covering almost Greenland's entire coast, to calculate the volumes of ice transported to the ocean by glaciers and how these volumes changed over time. The glaciers surveyed by those satellite and airborne instrument data drain a sector encompassing nearly 1.2 million square kilometers (463,000 square miles), or 75 percent of the Greenland ice sheet total area.

From 1996 to 2000, widespread glacial acceleration was found at latitudes below 66 degrees north. This acceleration extended to 70 degrees north by 2005. The researchers estimated the ice mass loss resulting from enhanced glacier flow increased from 63 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 162 cubic kilometers in 2005. Combined with the increase in ice melt and in snow accumulation over that same time period, they determined the total ice loss from the ice sheet increased from 96 cubic kilometers in 1996 to 220 cubic kilometers in 2005. To put this into perspective, a cubic kilometer is one trillion liters (approximately 264 billion gallons of water), about a quarter more than Los Angeles uses in one year.

Glacier acceleration has been the dominant mode of mass loss of the ice sheet in the last decade. From 1996 to 2000, the largest acceleration and mass loss came from southeast Greenland. From 2000 to 2005, the trend extended to include central east and west Greenland.

"In the future, as warming around Greenland progresses further north, we expect additional losses from northwest Greenland glaciers, which will then increase Greenland's contribution to sea level rise," Rignot said.

In the late 20th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced its most widespread warmth for 1,200 years, according to the journal Science. The findings support evidence pointing to unprecedented recent warming of the climate linked to greenhouse emissions.

University of East Anglia researchers measured changes in fossil shells, tree rings, ice cores and other past temperature records or "proxies". They also looked at people's diaries from the last 750 years.

Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa of UEA analyzed instrument measurements of temperature from 1856 onwards to establish the geographic extent of recent warming. Then they compared this data with evidence dating back as far as AD 800.

The analysis confirmed periods of significant warmth in the Northern Hemisphere from AD 890 - 1170 (the so-called "Medieval Warm Period") and for much colder periods from 1580 - 1850 (the "Little Ice Age").

The UEA team showed that the present warm period is the most widespread temperature anomaly of any kind since the ninth century.

"The [period of the] last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age]. It is a period of widespread warmth affecting nearly all the records that we analyzed from the same time," co-author Timothy Osborn told the BBC.

Osborn and Briffa used 14 sets of temperature records from different locations across the Northern Hemisphere. The records included long life evergreen trees growing in Scandinavia, Siberia and the Rockies which had been cored to reveal the patterns of wide and narrow tree rings over time. Wider rings related to warmer temperatures.

The chemical composition of ice from cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheets revealed which years were warmer than others. The researchers used proxy data developed from the diaries of people living in the Netherlands and Belgium during the past 750 years that revealed, for example, the years when the canals froze.

"These records extend over many centuries and even thousands of years. We simply counted how many of those records indicated that, in any one year, temperatures were warmer than average for the region they came from," said Dr Osborn.

Professor John Waterhouse, director of the Environmental Sciences Research Centre Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge commented: "Although we're getting increasingly accurate measurements of present-day temperature, we've got nothing like that from the past to compare those with. There's much uncertainty in past reconstructions. You've got to look at the reconstructed data in the past in light of the likely errors that those data have."

But he added: "As we get more and more evidence in, it is looking as if the current period is the warmest for over 1,000 years."

In November, Science published a paper showing atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane are higher now than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

Human activities are releasing greenhouse gases more than 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth's past, according to an expert on ancient climates.

"The emissions that caused this past episode of global warming probably lasted 10,000 years. By burning fossil fuels, we are likely to emit the same amount over the next three centuries," said James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Zachos presented his findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in St. Louis. He is a leading expert on the episode of global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when global temperatures shot up by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit). This abrupt shift in the Earth's climate took place 55 million years ago at the end of the Paleocene epoch as the result of a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of two greenhouse gases: methane and carbon dioxide.

Previous estimates put the amount of released carbon at 2 trillion tons, but Zachos showed that more than twice that amount--about 4.5 trillion tons--entered the atmosphere over a period of 10,000 years (Science, June 10, 2005). If present trends continue, this is the same amount of carbon that industries and automobiles will emit during the next 300 years, Zachos said.

Once the carbon is released into the atmosphere, it takes a long time for natural mechanisms, such as ocean absorption and rock weathering, to remove excess carbon from the air and store it in the soil and marine sediments. Weathering of land rocks removes carbon dioxide permanently from the air, but is a slow process requiring tens of thousands of years. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide much more rapidly, but only to a point. The gas first dissolves in the thin surface layer of the ocean, but this surface layer quickly becomes saturated and its ability to absorb more carbon dioxide declines.

Only mixing with the deeper layers can help restore the ability of the surface water to absorb additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the natural processes that mix and circulate water between the ocean surface and deeper ocean layers work very slowly. A complete "mixing cycle" takes about 500 to 1,000 years, Zachos said.

The greenhouse emissions that triggered the PETM initially exceeded the ocean's absorption capacity, allowing carbon to accumulate in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, humans appear to be adding carbon dioxide to the air at a much faster rate: about the same amount of carbon (4.5 trillion tons), but within a few centuries instead of 10,000 years. What was emitted 55 million years ago over a period of about 20 ocean mixing cycles is now being emitted over a fraction of a cycle.

"The rate at which the ocean is absorbing carbon will soon decrease," Zachos said.

Compounding this concern is the possibility that higher temperatures could retard ocean mixing, further reducing the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. This could have the kind of "positive feedback" effect that climate researchers worry about: reduced absorption, leaving more carbon dioxide in the air, causing more warming.

Higher ocean temperatures could also slowly release massive quantities of methane that now lie frozen in marine deposits. A greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, methane in the atmosphere would accelerate global warming even further.

Such positive feedback or "threshold" effects probably drove global warming during the PETM and a few other ancient climate extremes, Zachos said, and they could happen again. It is possible that we already are in the early stages of a similar climate shift, he said.

"Records of past climate change show that change starts slowly and then accelerates," he said. "The system crosses some kind of threshold."

Clues to what happened during the PETM lie buried deep inside the sediment at the bottom of the sea, which Zachos and his colleagues have probed during several cruises of the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). Composed mainly of clay and the carbonate shells of microplankton, this sediment accumulates slowly, but steadily--up to 2 centimeters every millennium--and faithfully records changes in ocean chemistry. The layer of sediment deposited during the PETM, now buried hundreds of meters below the seafloor, tells a clear and compelling story of sudden change and slow recovery, he said.

During the PETM, unknown factors released vast quantities of methane that had been lying frozen in sediment deposits on the ocean floor. After release, most of the methane reacted with dissolved oxygen to form carbon dioxide, which made the seawater more acidic. Acidic seawater corrodes the carbonate shells of microplankton, dissolving them before they can reach the ocean floor and reducing the carbonate content of marine sediment.

Zachos led an international team of scientists that analyzed sediment cores recovered from several locations during an ODP cruise in the southeastern Atlantic. Collected at depths ranging from 2.5 to 4.8 kilometers (1.6 to 3.0 miles), each sediment core bore a telltale PETM imprint: a 10- to 30-centimeter layer of dark red carbonate-free clay sandwiched between bright white carbonate-rich layers.

By relating the thickness of the clay layer to the rate of accumulation of marine sediment, Zachos estimated that it took 100,000 years after the PETM for carbon dioxide levels in the air and water to return to normal. This finding is consistent with what geochemists have predicted using models of how the global carbon cycle will respond to carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

"We set out to test the hypotheses put forward by a small group of geochemists who model the global carbon cycle, and our findings support their predictions," Zachos said. "It will take tens of thousands of years before atmospheric carbon dioxide comes down to pre-industrial levels. Even after humans stop burning fossil fuels, the effects will be long lasting."

By the next millennium the global map will have been redrawn by disastrous climate changes, according to a new forecast. An apocalyptic vision of life 1,000 years from now has been painted by a team of scientists studying the effect of global warming.

If mankind does not put its house in order, temperatures could have risen by 15C (27F) by the year 3000 and sea levels by more than 11 meters (36ft), flooding much of London, the team, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, says in a report for the Environment Agency. Abrupt changes could make Britain much hotter, or even — such is the uncertainty of the predictions — first colder and then hotter.

This could happen if the North Atlantic current system collapsed, denying Britain the warming effect of the Gulf Stream. Ocean surface temperatures would fall by 3C (5.4F), but as the Arctic sea ice melted, they would rise again by 8C (14.4F) in an abrupt turnabout over a period of no more than about 20 years.

Climate Change on the Millennial Timescale is the first study to examine comprehensively the impacts of global warming beyond the end of this century. It calls for continued efforts to cut the emission of global-warming gases to prevent the changes from getting out of control.

Baroness Young of Old Scone, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, said: "We are running out of road on decision-making. Unless we dramatically change the use of fossil fuels then we will be committing future generations to the most severe impacts of climate change."

By the year 3000, the report says:- Global warming could have more than quadrupled, with temperature rises of as much as 15C, if we continue burning fossil fuels

- Sea levels will still be rising at the end of this millennium and the total increase could reach 11.4 meters. This dwarfs estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that sea levels will rise by between 16cm and 69cm by the 2080s

- Anything more than a two-meter rise would flood large areas of Bangladesh, Florida and many low-lying cities, and displace hundreds of millions of people

- Abrupt climate changes are possible even after emissions cease because changes may be set in motion that cannot be stopped

- The acidity of the oceans will fall significantly, posing a threat to marine organisms such as corals and plankton. That, in turn, would affect the whole marine ecosystem

- The changes could be even greater than this if the climate turns out to be more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than the study assumes.

The solution, the team says, is to reduce emissions to zero by 2200.

Tim Lenton, lead author of the study, said: "While most studies stop at year 2100 with temperatures and sea level rising, we explored where they are heading into the next millennium. Only by starting to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now can we avoid dangerous climate change."

The message is that the world can afford to burn only about a quarter of its known reserves of fossil fuels. This implies a small increase in global emissions up to 2025, and reducing and eliminating them by 2200.

"If we follow business-as usual then we will commit future generations to dangerous climate change," Dr Lenton said. The risk was that of returning the Earth to a hot state it had not been in since 55 million years ago.

Baroness Young said: "Tough decisions are needed soon. Many of our coastal towns could be in jeopardy and immediate action needs to be taken if we are to avoid many of these impacts.

"We need to get tough on energy efficiency. This means much tighter standards for buildings and government providing proper incentives for businesses from the transport sector if we are to meet our 2010 target of 20 per cent carbon reduction and tackle more strenuous targets for 2020."

Back in the 1980s, airline pilots were told they must have been seeing things when they reported flashes of light shooting toward space atop thunderstorms.

But in recent years, scientists have photographed the mysterious flashes and come up with interesting names for them: elves, blue jets, tigers and sprites. The flashes are associated with thunderstorms, and each type is incredibly brief and behaves differently.

A new effort has produced the best images and video of sprites ever obtained.

The research, to be detailed Feb. 22 in the online version of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, should help scientists better understand the physics and chemistry of the events.

"By analyzing the high-speed images in sequence, we've been able to clearly define, for the first time, the processes by which sprites develop and what happens inside of them," said Steven Cummer of Duke University. "This understanding of sprite structure is a necessary step to further elucidate sprite dynamics and their possible effects on the upper atmosphere."

You’re not crazySprites were first imaged, by accident, in 1989, proving that airline pilots were not crazy. In the late 1990s, researchers began to make high-speed videos of the events.

Like lightning, sprites are electrical discharges. They are driven by a strong electrical field above a thunderstorm and so are associated with regular lightning, Cummer and his colleagues reported last year.

The duration of a sprite is literally less than the blink of an eye. They generally occur 20 to 50 miles above a thunderstorm, so spotting them from the ground requires a vantage point away from the clouds.

The new videos, shot last summer from a mountain in Colorado overlooking Kansas and Nebraska, were taken at 5,000 frames per second. The trickiest part: Because the cameras gather so much data, they could only be turned on when the researchers thought they spotted a sprite. Over the course of two months, the team captured 66 sprites on seven different nights.

New detailsThe observations show that sprites normally start nearly 50 miles high. Streamers rain down from the bottom of an initial, diffuse halo. The streamers branch out on the way down. As all this is unfolding in the blink of an eye, a bright column of light expands vertically from the starting point, reaching toward both Earth and space.

Bright streamers then shoot higher into the night. Bright dots appear. Other researchers have spotted these but nobody knows what they are. The dots glow longer than the rest of the sprite. Some of the dots occur where streamers collide, the new images reveal.

The dots might be important for understanding the chemistry of sprites and how they affect the atmosphere. "Electrons with enough energy to produce light can also produce interesting chemical species not normally generated," Cummer said. "Such chemicals might be long-lived and could be transported to other locations through the atmosphere."

Future research could yield insight into the connection between sprites and the traditional lightning we see below a storm, Cummer said.

At the moment the Earth has almost no net wobble motion, aside from very minor quivers such as are typically caused by atmospheric and tidal conditions. Chandler’s Wobble is virtually flat line. The daily track of the location of the Spin Axis is showing only tiny little rotations of a few days in duration in almost the same spot. Something has paused the normal spiral motion of the Spin Axis. We can now deduce that there is a relatively large, developing anomaly in the spiraling motion of the spin axis, including an huge phase shift, a shortening of the length of the normal 7 year cycle, the tightening of the spiral motion into an exceptionally small spiral, and a major acceleration in the drift of the Spin Axis (secular drift of the poles, or so-called True Polar Wander). This anomaly is on-going and portends major changes in tectonic activity during ensuing years.

(ECB – February 8, 2006, MWM) For at least three and a half weeks there has been almost no movement of the spin axis in the normal spiral track of Chandler’s Wobble. See an extensive analysis of the pause in the wobble as of February 8, 2006 at the website. It is also being sent to subscribers via email directly after this Bulletin. See the background report (as of Jan 18, 2006) and the latest plot: Go immediately and see the current wobble track. This introduction and all updates related to polar motion is written with the graph at

UPDATE 2/22: THE WOBBLE HAS MOVED MORE IN LAST WEEK THAN DURING ALL OF JANUARY

The pace of motion of the Spin Axis in its wobble continues to appear to be normalizing. Based on computer projections for the likely path, which the track of the real wobble appears to be manifesting, it is highly probable that a major phase shift has occurred in Chandler's Wobble. It is also more likely than not that a significant jump in the average location of the pole has occurred but it is too early to define the amount. At the moment both the X and Y plots are showing the Wobble headed for another X Motion Peak but I am finding it difficult to believe that it will continue in that pattern. As Hotno predicted, it is likely to be nearly another two months before the new pattern is objectively clear.

Los Angeles officials were still scratching their heads today over what caused a mysterious black goo to burble from streets downtown, forcing the evacuation hundreds of apartment dwellers.

A Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman said investigators had yet to identify the "black tarry substance" more than 24 hours after it erupted at Olive Street and Pico Boulevard. But he said there might be "a correlation" with a petroleum company drilling operation nearby.

"The samples we have taken - this was determined to be (a) nontoxin, nonflammable, nonhazard," said fire Capt. Ernie Bobadilla. "We're looking to I.D. the scope of the problem. "This problem is not a simple fix."

About 200 residents were forced to flee as a hazardous materials team and dozens of firefighters worked throughout the day to identify what was first deemed "a black tarry substance" and later morphed into a "watery mud."

While outside temperatures struggled to break 60, sidewalks in the vicinity steamed at 103 degrees, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Ron Myers said. "It's worrisome in the fact that it will keep the street closed and residents will be evacuated till the building is considered safe," Myers said.

Firefighters were alerted at 3 a.m. by complaints of a sewer-like smell at an apartment house at 1220 S. Olive St. near Pico Boulevard, but found nothing. They returned at 1 p.m. to find a Slimer-like ooze lurking beneath central Los Angeles.

"We were called back because there was a gooey substance, a tarry-type substance, coming out the underground electrical vaults, out of manhole covers in the street, through the sidewalks and possibly in one older apartment building," Myers said.

A 120-foot stretch of Olive buckled 1 1/2 feet, he said. The pre-1933 unreinforced masonry apartment building shifted one foot from its foundation. Sidewalks were as hot as Jacuzzis. And a pressurized liquid shot from every street orifice located above what used to be a historic oil field downtown.

No one was injured in what amounted to a black lagoon. Hazmat and Urban Search and Rescue crews determined that the mysterious substance wasn't flammable, Myers said. "Incident commanders are evaluating some form of drilling operation one or two blocks away as the possible cause," he added.

"They told us to get out from the building, because, probably, I don't know, anything could happen. The basement was flooding," resident Mary Robles told KABC-TV, Channel 7.

By late afternoon, the American Red Cross had set up an evacuation center for the 150 adults and 50 children forced to flee the stuff of nightmares.

"We're opening a shelter," said Nick Samaniego, spokesman for the Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles. "We're looking for a place to put them."

NewScientist reports, "Mysterious flashes of light called "sprites", that occur above thunderclouds during powerful storms, have been captured on film in unprecedented detail by researchers using an ultra-high-speed camera. The best images yet of the flashes – which resemble a giant undulating jellyfish with its tentacles falling from a halo of light – have allowed the team to pick apart their structure and mechanics. Sprites are fleeting events, which normally last between 10 and 100 milliseconds." In summer 2005, researchers from Duke University, and collaborators from FMA Research in Fort Collins, Colorado, kept a watchful eye on the skies above Yucca Ridge Field Station hoping to capture sprites in action using their 7000-frames-per-second camera. "The whole structure develops a lot in one millisecond. So by going with the faster video we really see all the pieces and how they develop in time," says Steven Cummer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

And with so much energy being pumped into a small region, Cummer says sprites may drive atmospheric chemistry that does not normally occur. "The significance at this point lies in what chemical effects these [sprites] may have on the upper atmosphere." The researchers say sprites typically begin at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 Kilometers) in the sky in single spots where the electric field creates spark. Those produce falling "streamers" that branch out as they fall. Much brighter, thicker channels follow, expanding upward from the original spots.

Editor's Note – UFOs videotaped from the Space Shuttle often hover over the sprites apparently in an effort to take on energy. Thanks to Kimm Groshong New Scientist.com news service.

A carbon-rich substance found filling tiny cracks within a Martian meteorite could boost the idea that life once existed on the Red Planet. The material resembles that found in fractures, or "veins", apparently etched by microbes in volcanic glass from the Earth's ocean floor. Details will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, next month.

All the processes of life on Earth are based on the element carbon. Proving carbon in Martian meteorites is indigenous - and not contamination from Earth - is crucial to the question of whether life once arose on the Red Planet.

Initial measurements support the idea that the "carbonaceous material" is not contamination, the scientists say. But the evidence so far is unlikely to convince the skeptics.

The research team includes scientists who brought evidence for microbial life in another Martian meteorite, ALH84001, to the world's attention in 1998.

The Martian meteorites are an extremely rare class of rocks. They are all believed to have been blasted off the surface of the Red Planet by huge impacts; the material would have drifted through space for millions of years before falling to Earth.

Fresh samplesThe latest data comes from examination of a piece of the famous Nakhla meteorite which came down in Egypt, in 1911, breaking up into many fragments.

London's Natural History Museum, which holds several intact chunks of the meteorite, agreed for NASA researchers to break one open, providing fresh samples.

"It gives people a degree of confidence this had never been exposed to the museum environment," said co-author Colin Pillinger of the UK's Open University. "I think it's too early to say how [the carbonaceous material] got there... the important thing is that people are always arguing with fallen meteorites that this is something that got in there after it fell to Earth. "I think we can dismiss that. There's no way a solid piece of carbon got inside a meteorite."

Analysis of the interior revealed channels and pores filled with a complex mixture of carbon compounds. Some of this forms a dark, branching - or dendritic - material when seen under the microscope.

"It's really interesting material. We don't exactly know what it means yet, but it's all over the thin sections of the Nakhla material," said co-author Kathie Thomas Keprta, of Lockheed Martin Corporation and NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

'Indigenous component'Peter Buseck, regent's professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University, told the BBC News website that he found no strong evidence of a biological origin for the carbon in the meteorite. He added that it was difficult to determine the origin of carbon in rocks based on microscopy.

Previous studies of the forms - or isotopes - of carbon in the Nakhla meteorite found a component of which more than 75% is lacking any carbon-14. Since all terrestrial life forms contain some carbon-14, this component was thought to be either indigenous carbon from Mars or ancient meteoritic carbon.

Professor Pillinger and colleagues are carrying out direct isotopic analysis of the carbonaceous material, but he admits terrestrial contamination is occurring when thin slices of the meteorite are made for analysis. However, the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in the epoxy used to prepare the thin sections is very different from that of the carbonaceous material in the meteorite's veins.

If it is indigenous to Mars, the authors say the "carbonaceous material" came either from another space rock that smashed into Mars hundreds of thousands of years ago, or is a relic of microbial activity.

A resemblance between the material in the meteorite and features of microbial activity in volcanic glass from our planet's ocean floor further support the idea they are biological in origin, says the paper. If this is the case, the remains of these organisms and their slimy coatings might provide the carbon-rich material found in Nakhla, the researchers argue.

Harold Carver writes, "I found what appears to be artificial substances on Mars taken by the Rovers. I have enclosed them inside the red boxes. One looks like a wafer or chip, and the other looks like a piece of pottery.

Bob writes from Australia, "I just wanted to point out something in first photo of Mars. Notice the rounded edge on the large piece of stone above the red box and also the rounded edge on the bottom of the piece to the left. They are smoothly rounded, as if plastered or shaped. Also on the large piece above the red square note the slightly raised edge at the back edge of the smooth surface. This is typical of a piece ofmolding being broken away from an adjoining wall to which it was fixed. Blessings, Bob http://marsrover.nasa.gov/home/index.html

Norman Bryden writes, "In this image section from a photograph taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, I have discovered what looks clearly like a large lake of liquid water." Notice the absence of rough craters in the image. This shows a fairly modern history of formation, and that the area is geologically active. Observe the lighter band left of center. This terrain is very different than the surrounding terrain. Take a look very closely at the shorelines. The shorelines that have not been disturbed are smooth and very well defined. They wave and meander just like any undisturbed lake found on Earth.

Now look at the light band between the two smoother and darker terrains. The shore line is very different. There are squared off corners and boxes, straightened lengths of shore and smaller boxes and crosses where the water fills what looks like bays. There is also a channel or river to the upper left that flows down to the lake. On both sides of this river channel the shore lines have been modified with straightened sides and corners. Various other areas of the lake have also been squared off into bays to the right. Other areas of the terrain look to be fairly recently modified in geological terms.

The lighter band also looks segmented into geometric capsules that look very much like populated housing in satellite images of Earth that you can see built near the shores of lakes and rivers. I have lived near the Charles River near Boston most of my life and have looked at satellite images of the coast and the river many times for comparison to the geography of Mars. This is very similar. Check out the satellite images yourself on Google Maps which works well for this purpose. This is strong evidence Mars is geologically active, has regions of lakes, rivers and in some images what looks like oceans or seas. This is also strong evidence that Mars has an intelligent species that has greatly modified the terrain differently than random acts of geological processes. So many well defined, structured and sharp right angled corners are strong evidence of intelligent design.

Harold Carver writes, "While looking at images that the Rover Opportunity took I noticed Endurance Crater lacks the profile of a crater, yet everything about it suggests that it was built to hold a body of water.

This water flows out of the sides of the crater into a reservoir. The angles are too precise to be a freak of nature and are suggestive of a purpose. Mars photos are at left and compare to a dam and spillway on Earth. The entire walls and floor of Endurance image seem to be made of fitted slabs of rock neatly put together. There is also evidence of artificially made spill-ways used for the collection of water.

ROSWELL --Major Jessie Marcel the 509th Group Intelligence Officer picked up debris with rancher Bill Brazel at the Foster Ranch at the crash sight near Corona, New Mexico on July 7, 1947. Later that night Marcel showed his wife and son who is now an Army Colonel and medical Doctor (Jesse Marcel Jr.) the strange writing on the debris. Later others at Roswell Air Base including Lieutenant Robert J. Shirkey saw the debris.

Major Marcel showed the debris to his Commander William Blanchard, who then ordered a news release that stated the Army Air Force had recovered a Flying Disc. Colonel Blanchard ordered the debris to be immediately flown with Major Marcel aboard a B-29, to 8th Air Force Headquarters at Fort Worth, Texas. The debris package was carried in the bomb bay with three guards. Marcel was met at the flight line by the second highest ranking officer at Carswell Army Air Base Colonel Thomas DuBose. Together they drove to General Roger Ramey's office with the debris, and waiting for them was James Bond Johnson a Fort Worth Star Newspaper photographer who took these photos.

Johnson who is still alive told me, when the officers arrived the package was still wrapped and they unwrapped the metallic burnt debris and spread them out on the General's rug. He remembered the debris smelled burnt like it had been in a crash.

Shortly, General Ramey arrived holding a message in his hand. Six photos are taken of General Ramey, Colonel DuBose, and Major Jessie Marcel with the debris. Four of the 4 x 5 negatives are now stored in the Archives of the University of Texas.

Several years ago the Roswell Photo Interpretation Team (RPIT) was formed to enlarge and evaluate these photographs. The computer enhanced photos show that General Ramey is holding a message that appears to state, "THE VICTIMS OF THE CRASH ARE BEING TRANSPORTED TO FORT WORTH." URGENT. POWERS ARE NEEDED AT SITE TWO NW ROSWELL, N.MEX."

Clearly much of the debris has strange markings or writing on it. A close up of the debris shows some strange writing taken by photographer James Bond Johnson. If you compare the Mars symbols with the debris in General Ramey's office there are striking similarities.

Neil Morris from the University of Manchester discovered that three symbols have now been cross matched on the debris footage beam. The details discovered in over fifty year old photographs indicate an object of much greater complexity than a simple radar reflector. Space ships like our own Moon Lander are made from surprisingly flimsy materials. The cross matching of these symbols indicate the debris is from an object alien to Earth, or at least to our methods of writing and symbols. All involved admit the debris shown was part of a disc recovered from the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico in 1947.

Norman Bryden writes, "It is difficult to display an image at this file size where structures can be seen on Mars. I have selected this portion of the Mars Global Surveyor photograph I discovered to help people possibly see what kind of structures may be on Mars. Although this section is nearing the limit of resolution, identifiable structures of geometric and large scale proportions can be seen.

I know the image is not the best quality, but I asked NASA for better pictures and clarification, but for some reason NASA prefers black and white hard to process photographs, and they do not respond to email.

To the top left of the section below are two very light markings. This looks to be the top of two twin towers or buildings reflecting light. Rectangular shapes can be seen standing up next to each other below the light markings. These rectangular blocks appear to have segmented levels as would be seen on buildings on Earth. Just above and slightly to the left of the dark lower left marking is another tower shaped building.

What looks like windows or portals can be seen on the sides and top. If you follow the tube like structure to the upper right corner of the image, you can see a giant arm chair shaped structure.

Other structures can be made out at the intersections of the tubes. The standing structures can be identified by the shadows of one side to the lower right and the lighter sides to the upper left, with the lightest side on the top. Thanks to Norman Bryden Link to NASA image:

Mac (take me to Mars) Tonnies offers his opinion on the below discoveries - the first by an amateur Martian artifact hunter and the second by NASA: (1) "Intriguing forms, as always, but nothing that makes me seriously think we're looking at evidence of anything but geology. But the thing is, I could be wrong; I'm going with Occam's Razor on this." (2) "Crumpler's got that right. 'Home Plate' is downright psychedelic."

I found what appear to be artificial substances on Mars. I have enclosed them inside the red boxes. One looks like a piece of pottery and the other looks like a wafer or chip. http://www.rense.com/general69/arti.htm

NASA scientists have observed an explosion on the moon. The blast, equal in energy to about 70 kg of TNT, occurred near the edge of Mare Imbrium (the Sea of Rains) on November 7, 2005. Several astronauts claimed to have seen construction and UFOs on the Moon an explosion could indicate mining or perhaps an accident.

"What a surprise," says Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) researcher Rob Suggs, who recorded the impact's flash. He and colleague Wes Swift were testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. On their first night out, "we caught one," says Suggs.

Lights are frequently recorded on the moon going back to 1540. Often the lights are noticed within or near craters for extended periods of time ruling out meteor strikes. Aristarchus is a large crater on the edge of a plateau within northern Oceanus Procellarum has had 448 recorded Transient Lunar events many before electric lights existed on Earth. Its at the upper left side at 10 o'clock just left of the red spot.

Keith Laney writes, enlargements made from both Apollo and LO photography show anomalous structures and sites of mining on the moon. I believe these are remnants of structures that used to be much larger and more defined. The solar wind from space has eroded down many of the sites.

This photo taken during Apollo shows a close up of a possible mining site. If you look along the inside of the small crater, you might notice this little bit of what appears to be a technical remnant, or a very strange almost mechanically linear arrangement of rusty stone, or some other sort of mechanical debris. There are also other curiosities lying about, I've noted some of them by arrows. Image Thanks to NASA.

Keith Laney writes, Enlargements made from both Apollo and LO photography show anomalous structures out of the path of further deposition and wasting that have walls and buttresses higher than the natural terrain. Meteoric rain degrades them but straight walls within walls simply don't appear on levels higher than the highest points of crater flanks which some of the ‘archeology’s I've found seem to do. I believe these are remnants of structures that used to be much larger and more defined.

If there is a single, ancient, long-abandoned edifice on the moon, if there is a single object indicating earlier intelligence, if there is still one recognizable rock drawing to be found, then just think what such a find would do to our conventional history.

A Soviet scientist who defected to the West claims that photographs taken by an orbiting satellite clearly show the ruined temples of a civilization—on the planet Mars!

The 58-year-old scientist was a high-echelon member of an elite team that has worked on Vostok I and carried Yuri A. Gagarin the first man in space. He reports in 1982, a Soviet satellite reached Mars and beamed back photographs of a large city.

Washington -- Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution released her "top 10" list of potential stars with planets having potential for life. They will be the first targets of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder, a system of two orbiting observatories scheduled for launch by 2020." This includes nearby stars of the right size, age and composition to have Earth-like planets circling them.

"There are 400 billion stars in the galaxy, and obviously we're not going to point the Terrestrial Planet Finder ... at every one of them," said Turnbull. So, on behalf of NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, she narrowed down the list to stars with planets with liquid water orbiting them.

Variable stars, which grow hotter and cooler, probably would not be conducive to life, so they were thrown out, as were stars that are too young or too old. Some are too gassy to have spawned planets like Earth, which contains a lot of metal. Others have massive companions whose gravity could interfere with the steady conditions needed for life to evolve.

Turnbull's Top 10 List includes 51 Pegasus, where in 1995 Swiss astronomers spotted the first planet outside our solar system, a Jupiter-like giant. Others include 18 Sco in the Scorpio constellation, which is very similar to our own sun; epsilon Indi A, a star one-tenth as bright as the sun; and alpha Centauri B, part of the closest solar system to our own. "The truth is when looking at these so-called 'habstars,' habitable solar systems, it is hard to really rank them. I don't know enough about every star to say which one is the absolute best one," Turnbull said.

Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, set up after U.S. government funding for the program was cut, said the current budget threatens other astronomical programs. Thanks to NASA.

Some 10,000 years after the last of their kind wandered the North American and Eurasian wilderness, woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) remain a fascinating subject of study for scientists, with implications for understanding the evolutionary origins of present day mammals. Mammoths and elephants belong to one of the most ancient mammalian groups and various recent studies have debated the genetic relationships between them. Now, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences have weighed in on the issue, with results supported by the oldest mitochondrial genome sequence determined to date from the remains of a mammoth that died approximately 33,000 years ago.

In "Complete mitochondrial genome and phylogeny of Pleistocene mammoth Mammuthus primigenius," published in the February 7 issue of PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Evgeny I. Rogaev, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at U Mass Medical School and professor of genetics at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, with colleagues from the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute at U Mass Medical School, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University and the University of California-San Diego, report the sequence of the complete mitochondrial genome (16,842 base pairs) of a woolly mammoth extracted from permafrost-preserved remains from the Pleistocene epoch, a period of time usually dated from between 1.6-1.9 million to about 10,000 years before present. Their study demonstrates that the woolly mammoth and the Asian elephant are a sister species that diverged soon after their common ancestor split from the lineage of the African elephant.

Dr. Rogaev and colleagues used extracted DNA from segments of a woolly mammoth leg with intact muscle and skin tissue that was found in the Enmynveem River valley in northeastern Siberia in 1986 and radio-carbon dated to be between 33,750 and 31,950 years old. They found that the DNA extracted from the well preserved tissue, while degraded, was nevertheless of remarkable quality and quantity. Using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques that allow for investigators to make a significant number of copies of a gene and thus create a template for sequencing, the scientists used different DNA extracts from the mammoth muscle tissue to reconstruct the complete mitochondrial genome in laboratories in Moscow in 2000, and independently, at U Mass Medical School a few years later.

While DNA is present inside the nucleus of every cell of the body, DNA in the cell's mitochondria offers investigators valuable information on evolutionary development. Distinct from nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA possesses its own genome of about 16,500 base pairs that exists outside of the cell nucleus. And whereas nuclear DNA undergoes the process of recombination, where sections of DNA from the mother and the father are mixed resulting in a more distorted genetic history, mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from the mother, allows for the tracing of a more direct genetic line.

Using the mitochondrial genome they had sequenced, Rogaev and his fellow scientists sought to uncover the evolutionary relationship between the extinct woolly mammoth and the Asian and African savanna elephants. Analysis of the creatures from the study of their biological form and structure have yielded conflicting results; for example, while dental characteristics suggest a closer relationship between the woolly mammoth and the Asian elephant, an examination of the structure of the trunk tip supports a grouping of the woolly mammoth with the African elephant.

To resolve this evolutionary mystery, Rogaev and colleagues sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes of the African and Asian elephants. Their subsequent analysis indicated that the woolly mammoth shared a common ancestor with the Asian elephant more recently than with the African elephant. This conclusion corroborates a paralleled and independent study of a younger mammoth (~12,000 years old) from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany as reported in Nature in December 2005.

Because the modern populations of African and Asian elephants are quite highly diverse genetically, the investigators also sought to determine if the same was true of different woolly mammoths living through the Pleistocene. Interestingly, in comparing the mammoth mitochondrial genome sequence to the longest mitochondrial DNA sequences available from other individual mammoths, the authors of this study found that the mammoths were highly similar, suggesting a relatively low genetic diversity of mammoth maternal lineages in a population spanning vast territory in Northern Siberia. These preliminary results suggest that Siberia was occupied by a relatively homogeneous population of woolly mammoth throughout the late Pleistocene. The scientists hope that further sequencing of mitochondrial genomes of other mammoth specimens can clarify the diversity of the ancient mammoth population.

Although previous studies have shown that the problem with using ancient DNA in evolutionary studies is that DNA modifications can lead to artifact mutations accumulating in postmortem material and, therefore, produce errors in sequences; the strategies and data provided by Rogaev et al demonstrate that their long genomic sequence is essentially free from such artifacts and that the mammoth genome is authentic. Further, they have demonstrated that large DNA fragments can be isolated from ancient specimens recovered from permafrost conditions and that the complete genes can be directly cloned or reconstructed for animals that disappeared from the earth many thousand years ago.

"The reconstruction of an animal's evolutionary history based on complete mitochondrial sequence analysis is a powerful method to determine the relationship between closely related extinct and extant species," said Rogaev. "However, data from both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA may offer further information on the development of a species. Given the unique quality of some specimens from mammoths found in Siberia, nuclear DNA may potentially be recovered and used for further confirmation of the results of this study."

I came from a family with a strong musical background, and still toy around with the old guitar once in awhile. My brother, who is an excellent guitarist, is playing with a group of musicians who practice a couple of nights a week not far from me, and I talk to my brother a couple of times a week. The group he is playing with has a bass player with a very interesting background in the United States military.

He has recently returned from active Army duty in Iraq, and is currently stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. The base lies about 20 miles west of my house. His job in Iraq was programming surveillance aircraft, and satellites relating to communications. A week or so ago, he and my brother were talking during a break in their band session. Only the two of them were present, and my brother has related this conversation to me nearly verbatim.

After getting to know the gentleman a little better each week, my brother, who is very interested in anything military, began to probe him about his background duties. The man admitted that he had spent several years at Area 51. This immediately sparked my brother's attention, although he knew enough to not tread too heavily. He asked the gentleman if he ever saw anything strange there. He answered yes, but could not elaborate. My brother then asked him about what type of security documents he had signed relating to his work at Area 51.

He told my brother that he was bound for life not to discuss anything he saw or worked on at 51. My brother, searching for a way to educe more information from him asked about UFOs, Black Projects, and more. To all of these questions, he stated, "I cannot discuss that."

Finally my brother asked him one last question, "Can you tell me this, Are we alone in the universe?"

Kecksburg, which was the location of something mysterious -- some would say something extraterrestrial -- 40 years ago, isn't Southwestern Pennsylvania's only connection to unidentified flying objects.

Uniontown native Gen. George C. Marshall was chief of staff of the Army during World War II, secretary of defense and secretary of state in President Harry Truman's administration and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of a Europe devastated by the war.

Some extraterrestrial experts believe that he was also part of a government coverup of alien visitors, although he couldn't be blamed for the handling of the purported Kecksburg landing since it happened six years after his death.

Larry Bland, the editor of the Marshall papers at the George C. Marshall Foundation Library in Lexington, Va., said there has been a stream of UFOlogists visiting the library to authenticate Marshall's signature on various documents.

But Bland doesn't believe there's anything to a UFO coverup, and he said that Marshall's signature could have been added to the bottom of some documents with the aid of scissors and a copying machine.

Marshall does have a connection to outer space in NASA'a Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala. But Bland said the center was named after him because it was originally an Army facility and it was opened at about the time of his death, not because he had any particular interest in outer space.

There are a number of reminders of Marshall in Uniontown, including the George C. Marshall Highway bypass around the city, a park and a memorial plaza at Uniontown's Five Corners intersection at Main and Fayette streets and Mt. Vernon Avenue.

The latest likeness is a mural of the general draping the side of a city building and calling attention to Joe Hardy's Marshall Plan II for the revitalization of Uniontown.

Local statuary of Uniontown's favorite son includes a bust, a "monumental-scale" bronze of Marshall on horseback and another of him seated on a park bench across from the memorial plaza.

There are no plans as of now for a statue of Marshall looking into the sky for a flying saucer.

Shortly after I began investigating UFOs in the late 1980s, I started to receive reports of unidentified ocean-going craft. Most of these reports came from a certain stretch of California coastline, from about Santa Barbara south to Long Beach. This particular body of water, I soon learned, had a widespread reputation as a UFO hotspot.

After several witnesses told me they believed there was an underwater UFO base there, I decided to conduct a more in-depth investigation to determine the truth....

...The area has for at least thirty years been the scene of UFO reports of all kinds: surface sightings of hazy craft which cruise leisurely in full view of military installations, aerial spheres bobbing in oscillating flight, gigantic cloud-cigars, and at least one report of an underwater UFO with uniformed occupants."

These are categories more than theories; within each definition a number of theories are possible. However, as categories, they do present a comprehensive overview of current ways of viewing the ET/UFO phenomenon, i.e., an inventory of the operative paradigms. Each category contains particular authors and researchers who fit with it (not a complete list, but just some suggestions). Some authors might fit into more than one category: for instance, Sitchin dominates category 3, but he could also go in 4, because of his reliance on Biblical material (especially the life and activities of the patriarch Abraham), as well as in category 7, because some elements of his work are close to, if not identical with, von Daniken. There are close parallels, and some important overlaps, between categories 8 and 9.

I exclude Star Trek/Star Wars spin-offs and sci-fi-related material in books and film, which is massive. Also, I do not delve into reports of diverse and warring aliens, friends and foes. There are simply too many variations to cover. But in general outlines, these complex, multi-species scenarios will fall into one or more of the categories listed. All theories exemplify intervention theory, defined in the Lexicon.

This inventory is nowhere near complete, but perhaps it will provide a helpful provisional framework for discussion. Readers are welcome to send comments and suggestions to John Lash.

1. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Aliens who belong to a technologically advanced civilization from somewhere in outer space made contact with the US government (and others, perhaps) in 1947, or earlier. The aliens cut a deal, offering to trade their advanced technology for the right to experiment with the population (Corso, The Day After Roswell). Source of innumerable conspiracy theories and nightmare tales of CIA mind control, cattle mutilations, underground labs, etc. Proponents: Timothy Good, David Icke, George C. Andrews (who carefully distinguishes between extraterrestrial friends and foes), and many others. This theory assumes that the aliens have an advanced interbreeding program (David Jacobs, The Threat), and that their aims are not at all benign but downright sinister.

2. The Benevolent ("Space Brothers") Hypothesis.Assumes various kinds of intervention, motivated by kind and helpful intent on the part of the aliens; or possibly as part of their program for boosting or initiating humanity to a more advanced level of consciousness. Most well-known example, Whitley Streiber's "visitors," and the Billy Meier Pleiadian scenario. After much research and reticence, the late John Mack (Passport to the Cosmos) also adopted this view. Includes the earliest contactees such as George Adamski, whose tall blond Venusians came to warn humanity about immanent self-destruction, pollution of the environment, etc. Earliest modern prototype for this theory, the "Lords of the Flame" (also from Venus) in the theosophical scenario of Madame Blavatsky.

3. The Sumerian File. Includes all theories centrally based on the Annunaki scenario found in Sumerian clay tablets, the oldest written documents on earth. Main proponent, Zecharia Sitchin, who maintains that the Annunaki descended to earth, founded civilization, and instituted theocracy. He also claims that these aliens come from Nibiru, the outermost member of our Solar System, with an orbital period of 3600 years, but this claim has not (to my knowledge) been astronomically verified. Spin-offs: Lawrence Gardner, Anton Parks, and many others. (This category is unique in its reliance on ancient textual evidence. Compare to category 9.) The Annunaki are space masters rather than space brothers. The Sumerian myth says they created humanity by genetic boosting of an apelike native population, so that humans could serve as their slaves.

4. Biblical UFOlogy. Includes hybrid and crossover theories that develop category 2 specifically in the context of the Old and New Testaments. Draws heavily on Apocryphal writings, especially the Book of Enoch with its famous account of "the Watchers," believed to be fallen angles. Uses a straightforward and literal-minded equation between aliens and angels. Proposes that angels described in the Bible — such as those seen in the visions of Ezekiel, or the one who wrestled with Jacob at the Jabbok ford on the Jordan River, or the Angel Gabriel who announced the birth of Jesus to Mary — were ET entities who are assumed to have a benevolent attitude toward humanity, consistent with the fulfillment of "God's plan."

Some of the angels may be fallen, but the leading assumption here is that the angel/ETs are on the side of the Father God, and the Father God is working for humanity (not against it, as the Gnostic theory, category 9, asserts). Epitomized in the Raelian cult with emphasis on the genetic creation of humanity by god-like ETs. This category reflects the deep religiosity of ET/UFO speculation, as well as its naiveté and attraction to the divine parental image. In some rare instances, Biblical UFOlogists approach the views of category 9 and challenge the identity and motives of the Creator God: e.g., Christian O'Brien, The Genius of the Few, and A. D. Horne, Humanity's Extraterrestrial Origins. These are both intelligent, sobering books.

5. The Mind Control Hypothesis.Largely developed by Jacques Vallée in a brilliant manner. He called the ET/UFO phenomenon "a spiritual control system." Equally so, John Keel (UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse) has explored this angle with sober and startling insight. Includes the influential writings of C. G. Jung. Also, Demonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. ETs are projections of imagination, or the collective unconscious, intrapsychic phantoms, psychic shape shifters, etc. The most intellectually sophisticated category (apart from 9, which incorporates it), it assumes that the Phenomenon (as Keel calls it) is totally real, but not in the sense that it appears to be. It operates as a “inboard" control system, rather than a miraculous event or supernatural intervention.

6. New Age or Visionary theories.Found in numerous versions which tend to proliferate wildly. Materials employed to develop this thesis are largely drawn from channeled writings. Examples are The Prism of Lyra and The Only Planet of Choice. New Age theories of alien contact tend to present a mixed bag of grand, starry-eyed plans and divine intentions involving a diverse cast of non-human species, some benevolent and some otherwise.

7. Ancient Astronauts.The Von Daniken Hypothesis, has spawned a wide range of spin-offs. Take away all the smoke and ladders and this is simply a "cargo cult" interpretation of alien contact. Although von Daniken steered clear of these explosive issues (Swiss neutrality?), the mystique of ancient astronauts attaches itself readily to the worst fringe element in modern thinking: i.e., crypto-fascism. We hear tales of Hitler escaping to South America in a saucer donated by his alien allies. Catastrophic theories of the Ice Ages and hollow-earth fantasias proliferate in this category. For a good critique, see Jocelyn Godwin, Arktos. Bear in mind that von Daniken´s artifactual and archeological evidence has been largely dismissed as fraudulent and fantastical. (We tend to assume that an advanced race would have advanced technology - but would it be that kind of technology, i.e., headphones and such gadgets?)

8. Shamanic – Indigenous – Otherworld.The most traditional of all nine categories because it draws upon world-wide folk-lore and mythology, for instance, the Aboriginal lore of Australia and the testimony of Zulu shaman, Credo Mutwa (who claims that the alien spirits are malevolent). Classic work: The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by E. A. Evans-Wentz, which inspired Jacques Vallée, plus Vallée's own, Passage to Magonia. Includes the intentional production of living phantoms (tulpas) demonstrated in Tibetan Buddhism (Alexandria David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet), Kachinas in the magical rites of the American southwest (Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi), and many reports from shamanic cultures, including ayahuascueros of the Amazon and urban DMT trippers. Carried to a level of high sophistication by the "Gnostic astronaut,," Terence McKenna in his speculations on the UFO-mushroom connection (The Archaic Revival).

9. ET/Archon theory, or the Gnostic theory of alien intrusion.Specific to JLL and the Gnostic material on Metahistory.org. To my knowledge, only Nigel Kerner (The Song of the Greys) is the only other author who equates modern Grey ETs with the Archons of Gnostic writings, but he does not develop this idea in depth, textually. Through Metahistory.org I do just that. The ET/Archon Navigator takes you to the relevant articles. This theory relies on the most solid and complete textual evidence from antiquity: the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices. It assumes that Gnostic teachers in the Pagan Mystery Schools were accomplished shamans who used paranormal powers such as remote viewing to detect aliens, as well techniques of psychic self-defense, to resist and repel them. About one-fifth of the surviving Gnostic materials are concerned with the ET/Archons, their motives, methods, appearances, tactics, etc. Their most accomplished power is said to be HAL, "simulation, substitution," i.e., virtual reality. They are imposters allied with the false Creator God (the Demiurge), Jehovah, who is working against humanity.

Kerner assumes that Archons have deeply penetrated our genetic makeup, but Gnostic writings support the view that they have only duped us into believing this is so, whereas they are in reality incapable of reaching or breaching the genomic intelligence we embody. Their victory lies in make-believe, getting us to act out what they pretend to be doing to us. They work through insinuation.

Gnostic cosmology is closely related to the modern Gaia theory of Lovelock and Margulis, for which it presents an ancient prototype. Gnostic writings explain the cosmic origin of the predatory ETs (both the fetal or embryonic and reptilian types), which no other theory can do. Our planet Gaia plays a key role in their presence in our minds and lives. The Archons are a spin-off of the intelligence of the divine being, Sophia, who is embodied in our planet, but they are not compatible with human intelligence, so they inhabit the solar system at large, apart from the earth - this is the Mystery teaching. (Gnostics taught that the earth does not properly belong to the planetary system, but is captured in it.) Archons introduce a deviant skew into human evolution. Our responsibility is to detect and correct it. In this way we align ourselves with Gaia, the planetary intelligence that initially produced the Archon species.

The Gnostic codices found in Egypt in 1945 warn explicitly that these predatory alien entities infiltrate our minds through spiritual belief systems. These systems, especially the Judeo-Christian-Islamic program of salvation, are not entirely of human origin, but arise in our minds due to non-human deviance. Salvationism is an ideological virus of extraterrestrial origin. Jehovah is a demented pseudo-deity who pretends to be our creator. Gnostics detected the presence of ETs in the same forms reported today. The Nag Hammadi texts contain firsthand accounts of alien abduction. But at a more profound level, the ancient seers who guarded the Mysteries also discerned the operations of the inhumane Archontic mind in the religious ideologies that are today tearing humanity apart at the seams.

A UFO investigator hopes to unravel a 30-year mystery - did spacemen land on a North Wales mountain? Unexplained lights in the sky, an earthquake and secretive men in suits all happened on a dark winter's night in 1974 as the people of Llandderfel and Llandrillo, villages in the Berwyn mountains near Bala, sat down to their evening's TV.

But the quiet was shattered by the rumbles of an earthquake, registering 3.5 on the Richter scale. As people ran from their houses, fearing another tremor, they witnessed a blaze of light on the mountain side above.

A local nurse and her daughters watched as a huge egg shaped craft lay on the ground with a pulsating orange and red glow. Police converged on the mountains, expecting to discover a crashed passenger jet - but what they did find has never been divulged.

Some think it was an experimental man-made top secret military aircraft, possibly a prototype Stealth bomber. Others believe it was an alien craft from another world. The incident fired the imagination of many, including UFO researcher Russell Kellett, who now is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Next month Mr. Kellett, 42, will reveal what he claims are "the true facts" at a meeting in Bala. It will be at the White Lion Hotel on March 25, at 1pm. Mr. Kellett, who lives in Filey, North Yorkshire, says he has 115 pages of documents about the "UFO crash" about which he insists there was a "cover-up."

Last night Mr. Kellett said: "I've had some information given to me, testimonies from a group of gentlemen. I have 115 pages of documents but the Ministry of Defense have told me that under the Freedom of Information Act I can't have documents "because of the fractious and conjure of internal discretion."

Mr. Kellett believes "they're talking gobbledygook." Mr. Kellett said on that night some personnel were given information to "expect 50 flashes of light in the sky." But, strangely, there are no records this exercise took place.

What was in those mystery boxes?IN true X-Files style there were reports of soldiers mysteriously arriving in the area and stopping people on their way home. One woman claimed she saw "coffin shaped" boxes being loaded aboard MoD vehicles.

Previous UFO researchers said they were contacted by soldiers claiming they removed "bodies" to Porton Down, the top-secret MoD germ warfare laboratory.

Farmer Hugh Lloyd, of Garthiaen, Llandrillo, who was 14 at the time, remembers seeing "this incredibly bright light lit up the sky, like an arc welder, two or three miles away, lasting for about 20-30 seconds." Although he never discovered the source of the light, a mysterious, colorful rock was found nearby by his sister a couple of days later. It was sent to London University but they have never seen it since.

Mr. Lloyd said: "I do not believe that it was a UFO but I would like to find out exactly what it was."

February 01, 2006-As the well known X Files catchphrase goes; 'the truth is out there.' That is what UFO investigator Russell Kellett hopes to uncover on his saucer searching mission in Conwy. But without the help of Mulder and Scully, the full-time researcher from Filey, North Yorkshire, has spent eight years unfolding the details of a paranormal event, believed to have occurred in North Wales nearly 32 years ago. And Russell is hoping that a return trip to the Welsh hills and vales will unearth new supernatural soils, and conclude the mystery that he has named Dragon Lights.

The story began when a group of four men were traveling home on the evening of January 23 1974. Editors Note: The article listed the date as 1973, instead of 1974. I informed them of their error. (B J)

They were near a field in Llandrillo when they saw an unidentified object land on the ground. Arriving promptly on the scene, the army ordered the men to leave but not before they caught a glimpse of five humanoid creatures, two of which were in distress. The military surrounded the area and told the men not to speak of what they had just witnessed, but the men later set up meetings to discuss their sightings.

The plot began to thicken as more and more witnesses spoke out, and after years of research, Russell discovered that there had also been an earthquake that night. He said: "My investigation is very detailed and has a lot of background to it and I have documents and witness statements that really are mind-blowing. I believe that a military movement out at sea caused the raising of a UFO from underwater which later crashed in land. My investigations so far have helped things to fall into place, this blows what happens on sci-fi TV right out of the water. I am currently searching for people in the area who have been on battleships and would be grateful if any readers who may have any information about a battle fleet that was in the Colwyn Bay/ Puffin Island or Liverpool Bay area at that time could get in touch with me."

Military interest in new brain-scanning technology is beginning to show a sinister sideSteven RoseThe Observer, Sunday February 5, 2006

Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we become emotional.

Brain imaging has become familiar. Scanners, known by their initials - CAT, PET, MRI - began as clinical tools, enabling surgeons to identify potential tumors, the damage following a stroke or the diagnostic signs of incipient dementia. But neuroscientists quickly seized on their wider potential. The images of regions of the brain 'lighting up' when a person is thinking of their lover, imagining traveling from home to the shops, or solving a mathematical problem, have captured the imagination of researchers and public alike. What if they could do more?

Recently I published the results of an experiment in which we looked at the regions of the brain that became active when people chose between competing products in supermarkets. Major companies, ranging from Coca-Cola to BMW, are starting to image the brains of potential customers to study how they respond to new designs or brands. They are beginning to speak of 'neuromarketing' and 'neuroeconomics.'

Such trends may be relatively innocuous, but the increasing state interest in what the images might reveal is less so. Specifically, what if brain imaging could predict future behavior, or indicate guilt or innocence of a crime? There are claims, for example, that it could reveal potential 'psychopathy', that the brains of men convicted of brutal murders show significantly abnormal patterns.

In the current legislative climate, where there have been attempts to introduce pre-emptive detention for 'psychopaths' who have not yet been convicted of any crime, such claims need to be addressed critically. They are and will be resisted by the judiciary, but recent developments suggest that this may be a frail defense against an increasingly authoritarian state.

More seriously, there is increasing military interest in the development of techniques that can survey and possibly manipulate the mental processes of potential enemies, or enhance the potential of one's own troops. There is nothing new about such an interest. In the US, it stretches back at least half a century. Impressed by claims that the Soviet Union was developing psychological warfare, the CIA and the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (Darpa) began their own programs. Early experiments included the clandestine feeding of LSD to their own operatives and attempts at 'brain-washing'. These were the forerunners of the hoods and white noise used by the British in Northern Ireland - until judged illegal - and more recently in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where they inhabit an uncertain borderline between what the US government regards as an acceptable level of violence and the torture that it denies committing.

By the 1960s, Darpa, along with the US Navy, was funding almost all US research into 'artificial intelligence', in order to develop methods and technologies for the 'automated battlefield' and the 'intelligent soldier'. Contracts were let and patents taken out on techniques aimed at recording signals from the brains of enemy personnel at a distance, in order to 'read their minds'.

These efforts have burgeoned in the aftermath of the so-called 'war on terror'. One US company claims to have developed a technique called 'brain- fingerprinting', which can 'determine the truth regarding a crime, terrorist activities or terrorist training by detecting information stored in the brain'. The stress of lying under interrogation is supposed to result in a specific wave form which electrodes measuring the brain's fluctuating electrical signals can detect. We may be skeptical about the validity of such methods, but they indicate the direction in which research is heading. The company claims its procedures have been accepted in evidence in court in the US.

The step beyond reading thoughts is to attempt to control them directly. A new technique - transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - has begun to generate interest. This focuses an intense magnetic field on specific brain regions, and has been shown to affect thoughts, perceptions and behavior. There are suggestions it could be used to control obsessive-compulsive behavior, while some even take seriously the scenario envisaged in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which TMS was used to erase unwanted memories of a love affair gone wrong. Currently only possible if a subject's head is put inside the relevant machine, TMS at a distance is now under active military investigation. So is chip technology, which might provide implanted prostheses to overcome sensory deficits or control behavior, and whose potential bioethics committees around Europe have been scrutinizing.

It is tempting to dismiss all these as technological fantasies and their proponents as sellers of snake oil, but the fact that a technology is faulty doesn't mean it won't be used. One only has to think of the tens of thousands of lobotomies carried out on schizophrenic patients in the past century. Britain is one of the world's leading examples of a surveillance society, observing its citizens through CCTV cameras and controlling their behavior with Asbos and Ritalin. The potential for surveillance of citizen's thoughts has moved far beyond the visions of 1984.

Science cannot happen without major public or private expenditure but its goals are set at least as much by the market and the military as by the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This is why neuroscientists have a responsibility to make their subject and its potentials as transparent as possible, and why the voices of concerned citizens should be heard not 'downstream' when the technologies are already fully formed, but 'upstream' while the science is still in progress. We have to find ways of ensuring that such voices are listened through the cacophony of slogans about 'better brains' - and the power of the military and the market.

- - - - -This is an edited extract from Better Humans? The Politics of Human Enhancement and Life Extension, a collection of essays to be published by Demos and the Wellcome Trust on Wednesday. Steven Rose is Professor of Biology at the Open University.

Dr Chris MoulinMany of us have experienced déjà vu - the unsettling sensation of knowing that a situation could not have been experienced, combined with the feeling that it has. It is usually so fleeting that psychologists have until recently thought it impossible to study. But for some people, the feeling of having been there before is a persistent sensation, making every day a ‘Groundhog Day’. Psychologists from Leeds’ memory group are working with sufferers of chronic déjà vu on the world’s first study of the condition.

Dr Chris Moulin first encountered chronic déjà vu sufferers at a memory clinic. "We had a peculiar referral from a man who said there was no point visiting the clinic because he’d already been there, although this would have been impossible." The patient not only genuinely believed he had met Dr Moulin before, he gave specific details about the times and places of these ‘remembered’ meetings.

Déjà vu has developed to such an extent that he had stopped watching TV - even the news - because it seemed to be a repeat, and even believed he could hear the same bird singing the same song in the same tree every time he went out. Chronic déjà vu sufferers are not only overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity for new experiences, they can provide plausible and complex justifications to support this. "When this particular patient’s wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he’d claimed to have already seen, he said ‘how should I know? I have a memory problem!’" Dr Moulin said.

For the first time, those who suffer chronic déjà vu can help provide sustained research into the problem. "So far we’ve completed the natural history side of this condition - we’ve found ways of testing for it and the right clinical questions to ask. The next step is obviously to find ways to reduce the problem," he said.

PhD student Akira O’ConnorPhD student Akira O’Connor, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is working with Dr Moulin to find ways of creating the phenomenon in the laboratory. Akira has begun inducing déjà vu in Leeds students using hypnosis, asking students to remember words, hypnotizing them to forget and then showing them the same word again to induce a feeling that they’ve seen it before. The students are then asked to make subjective reports - how déjà vu actually feels - in addition to the data about what they can and cannot remember.

This new program of research, the Cognitive Feelings Framework (CFF), is unique to the University, and is being conducted by Dr Moulin with ESRC professorial fellow Martin Conway. "By considering subjective experience - feelings - from a cognitive science perspective, we hope to better understand everyday sensations like déjà vu, and also to help understand cognitive impairment, for example in older adults," said Dr Moulin.

"People might suffer from chronic déjà vu, but be unwilling to discuss this with their doctor - any hint of ‘mental illness’ is, particularly to older people, a taboo subject. But as soon as we found this first patient, we discovered that if you ask the right questions, you find other people have experienced the same thing."

Chronic déjà vu can be distressing to the point of causing depression, and some sufferers have been prescribed anti-psychotics. But Dr Moulin’s group believe it is not a delusion, but a dysfunction of memory: "The challenge is to think about what this means. We can use it to examine the relationships between memory and consciousness.

"The exciting thing about these people is that they can ‘recall’ specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred. It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work." Dr Moulin believes a circuit in our temporal lobe fires up when we recall the past, creating the experience of remembering but also a ‘recollective experience’ – the sense of the self in the past. In a person with chronic déjà vu this circuit is either overactive or permanently switched on, creating memories where none exist. When novel events are processed, they are accompanied by a strong feeling of remembering.

A new collaboration launching this month with the University of York’s neuro-imaging lab will provide objective evidence to the subjective reports supplied by the CFF. "When examining someone’s subjective experience, it’s important to have an idea of whether their subjective account is comparable to other people’s," said Dr Moulin. "The neuro-imaging facilities allow us to see if the same areas of brain are activated in different people when they report certain subjective states. Ultimately, we may even be able to pinpoint the neural areas important for conscious states such as remembering."

Dr Moulin is keen to develop a network of patients in Leeds and across the globe who experience chronic déjà vu. "We’re finding people all over the world with these problems. Chronic déjà vu sufferers need the reassurance that they’re not alone, and we need them to help us learn more about who has it, what causes it, and why."

Humanity has been socialized in such a way as to be blinded to the true nature of reality. Psychic phenomena, or psi, are mysterious to us because our perception of them is distorted. The scientific study of psi (parapsychology) has a stigma of illegitimacy attached to it. Despite attempts by some rather adventurous researchers, the scientific community remains overall indifferent or even hostile to parapsychology. Nevertheless, public polls in North America have shown that the majority of people believe in some kind of paranormal activity. What are the foundations of such beliefs, and can we study them scientifically?

Few would argue that intuition does not exist. Whether as a collection of sense information or a supernatural ability, we have all experienced intuition. Some refer to this as their "gut" feeling while others view it as part of their psychic abilities. Despite the lack of an official endorsement from science, parapsychology has become accepted by many people.

While skeptics and believers debate the validity of parapsychology, researchers are attempting to prove its existence scientifically. A group of like-minded intellectuals have founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to "sponsor leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness."

Many of its members are actively involved in psi research to support an institute that "explores phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models." There are also numerous companies that offer parapsychology training for a price. They have simply ignored the questions concerning parapsychology and put it into practice.

Literally thousands of tests have been conducted to prove the existence of the paranormal. A common test administered requires the participant to "see" an image only visible to the controller. When the results are cumulated, the participants exhibit an accuracy substantially higher than one generated by random guessing. The problem with studies like these is that a single reproducible instance of paranormal activity is not yet achievable. These studies do, however, seem to indicate something profound about the nature of human consciousness. What mystery, if any, lies behind these growing testimonies to the paranormal?

Dean Radin, a member of the Noetic Institute, is one of the most visible supporters of parapsychology and has published a few books on the subject. He is constantly hosting lectures and trying to change the perspectives of his more traditional colleagues. His objective is to constantly challenge long-held beliefs and establish improved tests for psychic phenomena.

Attempts have also been made to scientifically study the healing powers of prayer. This somewhat controversial approach uses science to prove something traditionally taken on faith. Religious people do not require a scientific explanation of prayer. Psychic phenomena often deal with communication and empathy between two human beings. Connecting with other people in a non-physical way is an essential part of many religions. If parapsychology is analogous to spirituality, the religious community will have the same problems accepting it as the scientific community.

The difficulty of proving the existence of psychic phenomena by traditional means has created a need for a different interpretation of the data. Paranormal activity could lurk in the shadows hidden to our conditioned eyes. Maybe there is no distinction between the normal and paranormal. Human minds collect and organize information from many sources according to a unique belief system. Guided by science or religion, our current models seem unable to adequately incorporate parapsychology.

Renowned director, writer and producer David Lynch places great value on mental relaxation and Eastern meditation. He has founded The David Lynch Foundation, which endorses an educational system that encourages meditation and a stress-free environment. Eastern philosophies and religions seem to incorporate relatively recent advances in physics and modern philosophy. While this is not exactly the same as parapsychology, the David Lynch Foundation does represent an attempt to rationally examine our consciousness. If there is any merit in parapsychology it would manifest itself in students of the DLF.

Fundamentalists may dismiss parapsychology as pagan nonsense just as easily as a purely materialistic scientist does. Perhaps a more complete picture of consciousness needs to be developed before serious inquiries can begin. The limits inherent in our perceptions of reality are paradoxically revealed as our knowledge increases.

Does parapsychology reside in a "no man’s land" between the absolutes of science and religion? By using one exclusively to examine the paranormal produces an understanding that is limited. As with most of the mysteries that engage our curiosity, reducing parapsychology to mere figures reveals only a part of the truth.

Ignoring the material facts and focusing on the spiritual doesn’t fully satisfy our needs, either. It seems as though we need a combination of the two or a radically new perspective. To become more aware of the nature of reality, we have to recognize how we filter information and then pursue the most rational path.

Aren't time travel paradoxes fascinating? And even though the author's conclusion stated in the quote below is the most logical - it still doesn't explain the paradox of the man with no parents: "What happens when you go back in time and kill your parents before you are born? If your parents died before you were born, then how could you have been born to kill them in the first place?"

So by going back in time and altering the past, we merely create a parallel universe. So we are changing someone ELSE’s past by saving, say, Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated at the Ford Theater, but our Lincoln is still dead. In this way, the river of time forks into two separate rivers. But does this mean that we will be able to jump into H.G. Wells’ machine, spin a dial, and soar several hundred thousand years into England’s future? No. There are a number of difficult hurdles to overcome.